Category: McCoy Fall 2014

I feared that attending another plagiarism talk would prove to be a fruitless endeavor, being that I’ve heard the content more or less a dozen times before. I’m sure the people delivering the talks have heard criticisms from people like me before (people who think they’ve heard it all) and still continue to witness events of plagiarism, thereby solidifying the importance of the talks. What I find to be interesting at these talks (and necessary to address) is one’s inability to hand in the same work for more than one class. In high school, though I never attempted to do this for fear of all my teachers having some mass anti-Sarah congregation, I did not fully realize the importance of avoiding this. If a certain assignment fits the requirements for more than one class, and you yourself have produced that assignment, why not hand it in? I suppose the answer is simple: you’re getting nothing out of handing in that same paper more than once, you’re not encouraging yourself to think differently, to produce more work from a different perspective, etc.

Continue reading “Common Knowledge v Common information (Connotation v Denotation?)”

A student in the creative writing class I’m in wrote a short story from the perspective of a young man who sexually assaults his classmate.  It is a well-written account of the build-up to the rape.  The reader sees the narrator, Ben, try to weave unreliable logic together in order to justify his actions.  He reminds himself that he cares about his classmate, that they are in love.  In reality the “couple” had only shared a few sentences before the night began.  At the end of the workshop, another classmate commented that she really liked the original point of view it was written in.  The writer responded that she had written a first draft of the piece from the victim’s point of view, but that she thought that had been done before, so she rewrote it from the attacker’s point of view.  The teacher added, almost leaping across the table how happy she was for making that change.

“Thank you!” She exclaimed.  “I have found that the female’s point of view is so over-written.  I commend you for taking on a different perspective.”  There were a series of other comments from students agreeing with what my teacher said. Continue reading “Are Politics Personal?”

While reading Moran’s Interdisciplinarity, I came across a sentence that made me immediately think of Zulus. On page 45, he states that “…the definition of ‘culture’ has been linked to questions about the cultural construction of identity and meaning , particularly in relation to the broader operations of power in society.” Now, this quote comes from the second chapter of his book and the chapter goes on to discuss and analyze the connection between literature in culture. I am not blind to the fact that there are many other noteworthy ideas in this chapter that I’m sure could also be connected back to the topic of our conversations lately, but this particular sentence was the only one that made my mind immediately jump to Zulus and for that I believe it to be post-worthy.  Continue reading “How to be an Individual: Zulus edition”

http://www.buzzfeed.com/jenniferschaffer/things-english-majors-are-tired-of-hearing

One of my family members sent this link to me from Buzzfeed.com and thought I should share it on here; I personally like number 12 the best!

While I can understand the logic behind the “English majors are pretentious because they are” theory, I think it is difficult to refute because it seems incriminating. Out rush the “Hey, I’m not pretentious!” responses, which are easily ignored as they seem to adhere to the whiny nature of the supposed pretentious English major. Simply, it is impossible to claim one is not pretentious without looking dramatic and self-pitying, and therefore, pretentious. But I think saying “English majors are pretentious because they are” can be a bit dangerous.

Continue reading “Delayed Response to English and Pretension”

What a terrible title for a blog entry. Zulus is a novel so full of allusions and literary maneuvers that Percival Everett had to start stuffing them into the chapter titles. Which specific example of allegory could I possibly mean? Or do I intend to dissect ALL examples of allegory in Zulus, if there are any? The former. Definitely the former. Just ignore the title — that would probably be best. Consider it a bad joke that I’m sharing with myself. Continue reading “Allegory in Zulus”

Percival Everett’s Zulus is an unavoidably thought-provoking piece that has the tendency to trip and mystify the reader as pages turn. As we’ve been trekking forth on our journey in this book, I’ve found myself really enjoying it. There’s something about dystopian literature that, more often than not, appeals to me. My own thoughts as to why this happens with me would be that it has to do with the mystery; those deep, black caverns spanning that – often vaguely explained – void between what we experience in real time today and what whichever book claims our future to be. In the dystopian literature I’ve been exposed to, that question is a constant cloud over most of the story. I could include Zulus in this category. Although the bulk of the mystery has been implied to, this air of secrecy and puzzlement is heavier in this than in most other books I’ve encountered. When trying to understand and analyze Everett’s piece, I find I can only laugh in my bemusement. Continue reading “Demanding Zulus”

Sometimes I think there is no recognisable discipline of ‘English’, no genuine whole, but only a set of contrived frontiers and selected approaches which, for complicated historical and cultural reasons, have come to be known as a ‘subject’.

– Richard Hoggart

I love hypothetical scenarios. I love thinking about ‘what might be’ in most situations – world politics, technology, parallel universes – even if I have a cursory understanding of some of those subjects at best and even if my predictions are seriously flawed. The simple act of guessing makes my brain feel like the world’s most satisfied CPU as I crunch the numbers and weigh the options. This quote, by Richard Hoggart, made me wonder about a world without I.A. Richards and F.R. Leavis, a world without English. Continue reading “Hypothetical Scenario: What If English Didn’t Exist?”